Program Details

Keynote Speakers

​​​David Crook

​David is a Principal Research Fellow at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, Australia, and has more than 20 years’ research experience in government and university sectors. His research focusses on fish movement and migration, population structure, riverine ecology and fisheries. After almost a decade working at the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research in Melbourne, David joined Charles Darwin University in 2012 to lead a major radio and acoustic tracking study of the movements of barramundi and other fishes in Kakadu National Park. He has since commenced work on several new projects, applying techniques including telemetry and otolith chemistry to increase our understanding of the migrations and population connectivity of freshwater, marine and diadromous fishes.

​​Yuuki Watanabe

​Yuuki Watanabe is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Polar Research in Japan. Yuuki Watanabe received his Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2007. Afterward, he was a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) fellow at the International Coastal Marine Research Center of the Ocean Research Institute at the University of Tokyo in Otsuchi. He then joined the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan, in 2008. His research interests center on the ecology, behavior, and adaptations of marine animals (fishes, seabirds, and marine mammals). He is especially interested in the use and development of animal-borne electronic tags (e.g., accelerometers and video cameras) that can “visualize” animals’ underwater lives. He is actively writing magazine articles and books about his research aimed at a general public audience. He has received the President’s Award of the University of Tokyo (2007), Yamazaki Prize (2011), Mainichi Publishing Culture Prize (2014), and Young Researchers Prize (2015).​

​​Christine Dudgeon

Christine Dudgeon is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia whose research interests include contemporary and historical population dynamics, speciation and conservation biology of marine organisms. Her research integrates a range of innovative approaches including telemetry, genetics, natural tags and citizen science. She has applied acoustic and satellite telemetry to examine movement ecology of sharks and rays in Australian waters as well as developed methods to incorporate acoustic telemetry into mark-recapture and mark-resight frameworks for estimating population demographic parameters and abundance. She was awarded a Bachelor of Science with Honours from James Cook University, Townsville (1998) and completed her doctorate at the University of Queensland (2009) on ‘The Ecology of the Zebra Shark Stegostoma fasciatum’. She has a soft spot for elasmobranch fishes and co-founded the Oceania Chondricthyan Society and is a member of the Oceania IUCN Shark Specialist Group.

​Esben Moland Olsen

Esben Moland Olsen is a Principal Scientist at the Institute of Marine Research and Professor at the University of Agder, Norway. His research focusses on the evolutionary ecology of coastal fishes and their responses to human-induced environmental change. His background is from the University of Oslo, Norway, where he completed his PhD in 2000 working on life history evolution in brown trout (Salmo trutta). In ongoing projects, he uses a combination of acoustic telemetry and mark-recapture techniques to study the behaviour, demography and life-histories of coastal species such as the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua). He also uses acoustic telemetry to quantify the extent to which marine reserves may offer protection to harvested fish, and the fine-scale spatial ecology and habitat use of fish within and around protected areas.